Harnessing the strength of a natural process that repairs damage to the human genome, doctors at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, have helped establish a method of therapy that can correct mutations in the IL-2R gene that is associated with the immunodeficiency disease SCID

Harnessing the strength of a natural process that repairs damage to the human genome, doctors at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, have helped establish a method of therapy that can correct mutations in the IL-2R gene that is associated with the immunodeficiency disease SCID.

Children with SCID are unable to fight off infections and must live in a germ-free environment. By artificially initiating a DNA repair process known as homologous recombination, physicians were able to replace a mutated version of the gene that encodes IL-2R.

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